Welcome to my world. I am certain there is some kind of bug with maya 2012 when saving.

For me sometimes I'll open the scene I just saved and I'll get a blank screen and when I refresh I'll get "line 762: error: parsing arguments" and the scene opens in wire frame. It is ALWAYS line 762 and it does not matter how big the scene file is or what the scene file is which strikes me as very odd.

Then sometimes it opens in wire frame and I have shader nodes in my outliner and I cannot make them go away. Every material I add adds another shader node to the outliner.

The only way to fix things once either of these errors occur is to save the file. Yes, the exact same file that just gave me errors! Then either delete the maya folder or the userprefs file or replace them with a known good copy. Open the same file and it will be fine!

I can then open and close the same freaking file. Make no changes, just open, close, open close, saving on each close and eventually I will open the file and get one of the two errors above!

The other consistent thing that causes a crash and sometimes a crash dump is deleting history! I now have taken to saving the file, then deleting history, then jiggling the display, then saving the file again! What a pain in the ass!

I am telling you, it's absolutely making me insane! In over 14 years of using Maya, I have never experienced this kind of consistent and annoying and productivity killing problems! It is literally sapping my will to even want to use Maya!

I have been working on a project and I just work until the first crash and then I just don't have the will to even want to open Maya again and spend the rest of the day doing modo and max tutorials or work on alias or SW projects.

Most of my system is not that old (i7-920, 24GB of 1600 cas 7 memory, win7x64, sata2 7200 rpm disks). The only thing that is getting really old is my pair of 2048 DDR3 GTX 285 FTW's and 9800 GT card). I have the 285's SLI'd and use the 9800 for physx. I use SLI and physx mainly for games but I also have applications that use GPU's and CUDA.

NO I DO NOT HAVE SLI MODE ON WHEN USING MAYA.

I can dynamically turn SLI and Physx on and off based on application.

I run Alias and SW professionally on this machine and they NEVER crash or have any problems to speak of. I use Modo and Max as well and they are solid as a rock with no unusual crashes or odd behavior.

Only Maya 2012 is giving me fits!